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    <meta name="author" content="Paul Bender" />
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    <title>Minimyth2 - Documents - History</title>
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        <div class="heading">MiniMyth2</div>
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          <span class="menuItemFirst"><a href="index.html">Home</a></span>
          <span class="menuItem"     ><a href="document.html">Documents</a></span>
          <span class="menuItem"     >History</span>
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        <div class="heading">History</div>
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          <div class="heading">Preamble</div>
          <p>
            I'm lover of Myth since 2003. My first system was based on EPIA and excellent MiniMyth distro.
            I was so immpressed by versality and compacteness of MiniMyth so at 2008 I started develop my own diskless
            system called MiniMyth2 as derivate on MiniMyth. Generally, I hate documenting so forgive me errors and 
            inconsistences.
          </p>
          <div class="heading">History</div>
          <p>
            In 2003, Larry Matter (<a href="http://minimyth.org/forum/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&amp;u=2">lmatter</a>)
            created MiniMyth.
            He wanted a small Linux distribution that would allow him to turn a diskless
            <a href="http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/mainboards/motherboards.jsp?motherboard_id=81">VIA EPIA M</a>
            motherboard into a
            <a href="http://www.mythtv.org/">MythTV</a>
            frontend.
            He brought to life and maintained MiniMyth, the LinPVR.org site, the forum, the version control system and the bug tracking system.
            In addition, he wrote several articles and reviews that helped people with things related to MiniMyth.
          </p>
          <p>
            Like so many other useful Open Source projects, MiniMyth gained a following.
            Some of those followers began to help Larry with the MiniMyth effort.
            <a href="http://minimyth.org/forum/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&amp;u=3">BigA</a>
            helped with the initial testing of MiniMyth 0.1.
            Jason Barto helped with the LinPVR.org site.
            <a href="http://minimyth.org/forum/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&amp;u=3">BigA</a>
            set up the forum.
            <a href="http://minimyth.org/forum/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&amp;u=46">Dna</a>
            helped with the MiniMyth build system.
            Others, including
            <a href="http://minimyth.org/forum/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&amp;u=159">corwin</a>,
            <a href="http://minimyth.org/forum/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&amp;u=5">Hairlocks</a>,
            <a href="http://minimyth.org/forum/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&amp;u=157">mjhammel</a> and
            Paul Bender (<a href="http://minimyth.org/forum/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&amp;u=203">Pablo</a>)
            created their own MiniMyth versions and/or MiniMyth build systems.
          </p>
          <p>
            In 2005, Larry and Paul began to work on Paul's GAR based MiniMyth build system together.
            With MythTV 0.17, this GAR based MiniMyth build system became the default MiniMyth build system.
          </p>
          <p>
            Over time, the demands of Larry's real life made it difficult for him to devote very much time to MiniMyth development.
            As a result, at this time Paul is doing much of the MiniMyth development.
            As always, the MiniMyth user community continues to contribute through ideas, testing and bug fixes.
          </p>
          <p>
            In 2008, Paul moved MiniMyth from LinPVR.org to
            <a href="http://minimyth.org/">minimyth.org</a>.
          </p>
          <p>
            Since its initial creation, MiniMyth evolved to include support for additional MythTV plugins,
            <a href="document-boot.html">boot methods</a>.
            and
            <a href="document-hardware.html">computer hardware</a>
            However, in this evolution it has tried to stay true to Larry's original vision of
            a small Linux distribution for turning a diskless computer into a MythTV frontend.
          </p>
          <p>
            In 2013, Piotr Oniszczuk (warpme@o2.pl) created alternative verssion of Minimyth called MiniMyth2.
            warpme decided to create separate to Minimyth project because of different project goals. Also he want to 
            avoid confusion between those two projects as MiniMyth2, compared to Minimyth, has some components removed, 
            some added and some are different. Those differences will have considerable impact on support and maintenance areas.
            From this perspective warpme thinks separation will make users life easier.
          </p>
          <p>
            MiniMyth2 compared to original Minimyth has following components changed:
            <ul>
              <li>Init sub-system is based on bash. Sometime ago, Pablo decided to move Minimyth init process to perl.
                   Major reason was speed-up of boot process. One from major assumptions for MiniMyth2 is extensive usage 
                   of suspend-to-RAM sleep/resume. This results with much lower numbers of cold/warm system boots so speed 
                   of init process becomes less important. I believe any further efforts related to MiniMyth2 boot area 
                   should be targeted to systemd as it allows to best reward (in terms of speed-up) for taken work 
                   (move current SystemV to systemd).
              </li>
              <li>All game emulators (mame, snez, etc) are moved to separated software group and, for reducing image 
                  size, are excluded from MiniMyth2 image. warpme plan is finally move them to external category and finally 
                  offer them as .sfs archive.
              </li>
              <li>PXE environment was changed from gPXE to iPXE. iPXE is actively maintained successor for gPXE and warpme 
                  thinks switch to iPXE is a future.
              </li>
            </ul>
          </p>
          <p>
            MiniMyth2, when compared to original Minimyth, has following components added:
            <ul>
              <li>udisks and related required infrastructure (sgutils, atasmart, polkit, LVM, etc). As current MythTV for 
                  external media discovery relies exclusively on udisks - warpme decided add it to MiniMyth2.
              </li>
              <li>VDPAU based hardware decode support for AMD/ATI graphics. MiniMyth2 has latest X.org ATI driver, 
                  latest Mesa3D configured to use Gallium/LLVM driver model for AMD/ATI. This allows to have working 
                  hardware video decode on AMD/ATI cards with UVD2.2+ decoders.
              </li>
              <li>Perl packages required to supporting OSD notifications and OSD status reporting features.
              </li>
            </ul>
          </p>
          <p>
            MiniMyth2 compared to original Minimyth has following components removed:
            <ul>
              <li>External Media players. warpme experience with build-in MythTV is good enough that last years warpme was using 
                  it as exclusive player for all content he has. This expirience and strong desire to reduce MiniMyth2 
                  image size to possible minimum leads to decision to remove all external players (mplayer, Xine and VLC) 
                  from MiniMyth2.
              </li>
              <li>Graphics drivers and their config/support related parts for: Openchrome (VIA), Savage (SiS), Goede and 
                  FOSS Nvidia (nouveau). Currently MiniMyth2 has build-in drivers only for:
                  <ul>
                  <li>Nvidia (closed source drivers)</li>
                  <li>ATI (FOSS)</li>
                  <li>Intel (FOSS)</li>
                  <li>VMware</li>
                  </ul>
              </li>
              <li>Support for MythTV releases older than 0.27-fixes/Master.
              </li>
            </ul>
          </p>
          <p>
            MiniMyth2 has dedicated webpage 
            <a href="http://MiniMyth2.homenet.org/">MiniMyth2.homenet.org</a>.
          </p>
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          Last Updated on 2017-08-10
          <br />
          &lt;&nbsp;mailto&nbsp;:&nbsp;warpme&nbsp;at&nbsp;o2&nbsp;dot&nbsp;pl&nbsp;&gt;
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